Having lived in Colorado for all of my 59 years, I’ve certainly suffered from immigration. It’s cost me a job or two because immigrants from New York or Pennsylvania went to better schools and boasted more impressive resumés. I’ve had to compete against well-heeled California immigrants for housing.
After these immigrants settle in, they assault our customs and culture. They’re always in a hurry, so they drive too fast. They try to outlaw humble items that offend their delicate aesthetic sensibilities, like woodpiles, junk cars and clotheslines. If they’re from Texas, they want our schools to focus on Jefferson Davis rather than Thomas Jefferson, and that after starting the day with public prayer. If they hail from California, then our schools should focus in improving self-esteem, rather than grammar or multiplication tables.
But irksome as those immigrants may be, they’re not the ones that get the headlines these days. Instead, it’s Arizona’s new immigration law.
The state is cracking down on undocumented immigrants by requiring that anyone reasonably suspected by police of being an immigrant be able to produce the appropriate papers. Much of America has denounced this, and plans to boycott the Grand Canyon State.
In the past, when I’ve been asked how America should handle immigration from Mexico, I’ve cited Edward Abbey. Catch them at the border. Issue rifles and ammunition, then send them back to Mexico, now equipped with the tools to fix whatever there is about that nation that compelled them to leave it.
The idea has a certain appeal because I, like Abbey, worry about the environmental effects of having too many people in our arid and empty part of the world.
Then again, Mexican immigrants are part of the American tradition. Like my own ancestors, they come to the United States in hopes of a finding a better life. You can’t hate people for that.
And I’m enough of a history buff to know that the border between the United States and Mexico is basically just a line drawn by politicians. Every afternoon, when I walk my dog on the east side of the Arkansas River, I’m crossing what was the U.S.-Mexican border for a quarter of a century.
The boundary hasn’t always been where it is today. But it is a border, and national borders are supposed to mean something.
But what should be done? Neither major political party is going to be of much help here. Republicans may believe in law and order, but it’s also a party that believes in cheap labor, and Democrats are loathe to offend any ethnic minority.
Further, I’m reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s 1854 statement on slavery: “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do…”
Consider the options:
1) They’re lawbreakers, so round ’em up and send them back to Mexico.
Most estimates put the undocumented population at about 12 million people, That’s a lot of people — more than the combined populations of Utah, Nevada, Idaho, New Mexico, Montana, Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming.
Could we hire enough cops? And provide enough holding facilities? And conduct fair hearings with due process to be sure we’re not deporting citizens or legal immigrants? And transport them south for hundreds of miles when we’re talking about 240,000 busloads?
Appealing as this notion might be to certain right-thinkers, it’s clearly impossible.
2) Build a better fence. There is, however, the common observation that a 10-foot-high border fence leads to 11-foot ladders.
Ignore for a moment the environmental issues that come from fragmenting habitat along the 1,969-mile border, and consider that the Great Wall of China failed to keep Manchu “immigrants” out of the Celestial Kingdom — one of its gates was opened by a disgruntled Ming border officer.
Also note that most of the violence along the Arizona-Mexico border comes from drug smugglers — there’s a lot of money to be made in that pursuit. As the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero noted, “There is no fortress so strong that money cannot take it.”
In other words, as long as America insists on drug laws that elevate the prices of uncontrollable substances, the border will be porous, and immigrants will also take advantage of that. And so far, no one with any political heft has proposed reforming our draconian drug laws.
3) Penalize employers. They are, after all, the ones who benefit most from illegal immigration, in that they get cheaper labor.
It’s as simple as supply and demand; the greater the supply of labor, the lower the cost. The Populists saw that back in 1892, when their platform denounced “imported pauperized labor” that “beats down wages.”
But I’ve been an employer. It did not give me any special expertise in determining whether identification was valid or whether documents were forged, or if an applicant was telling the truth about his birthplace (which I couldn’t ask about anyway, since it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of national origin).
It’s not hard to imagine how a lot more employment discrimination could develop if there was more enforcement aimed at employers.
So I don’t see any realistic near-term solution to America’s immigration issues.
But there might be a solution for Arizona’s new crackdown. Instead of demanding documents from suspected illegal immigrants when they encounter public officials, the state should demand documents from everyone on every possible occasion — that is, even if you’re blond and blue-eyed and have no trace of an accent, you still need to produce proof of citizenship to check out a library book or to pay a water bill.
This approach would avoid even a hint of racial or ethnic profiling, so there would be no reason to boycott the state on that account. And its beleaguered residents, tired of producing their citizenship papers on a daily basis, would put serious pressure on the legislature or else mount a repeal initiative.
For as Ulysses S. Grant stated in his first inaugural address, “I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”
So let’s see some “stringent execution” in Arizona, and see how long that law lasts.
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